What I’m Reading

Once installed, the vent goes about building a profile for the room it’s in.

The post The Brilliant Air Vents You Never Knew You Needed appeared first on WIRED.

There’s a horde of startups trying to replace email.

Some of these apps, like Slack (which we use at Business Insider), take a chat-room approach.

There are enterprise messaging apps that work like Snapchat, like Cotap and TigerText.

Some mobile-first productivity apps like Quip imagine that we’ll communicate directly in the documents we’re working on.

They’re all wrong. 

According to the latest research conducted by the Pew Center Internet Project, 61% of American workers now say that email is “very important” for doing their job. 

That number hasn’t moved at all in 13 years. As the researchers put it:

As early as 2002, Pew Research Internet surveys showed that 61% of American workers were using email at work. In 2008, we reported that 62% of working American adults were “networked workers,” meaning they used the internet or email in the workplace….Email’s vital role has withstood major changes in other communications channels such as social media, texting, and video chatting. Email has also survived potential threats like phishing, hacking and spam and dire warnings by commentators and workplace analysts about lost productivity and email overuse.

Why is email so resilient? The report doesn’t go into that, but it’s pretty obvious:

• Everybody has it on every device. There’s no need to download anything, no need to learn a new app or system, no need to persuade your coworkers to use it.
• It’s less interruptive than a phone call. The only other mode of communication that reaches everybody is the phone. But placing a phone call requires the other person to be available and willing to talk, right then.
• It’s exceptionally flexible. Most of the tools that aim to replace email require you to do things in a certain way — for instance, if I want to make sure a colleague sees a message I post in Slack, I have to tag them with their handle, otherwise it might get lost in the flow of information in their newsfeed. (Sometimes, it gets lost anyway.) When I used Yammer at a previous job, we had to come up with conventions for the kinds of things we’d post and avoid. With email, it’s basically a blank slate — you can put anything you want into the blank box and the person on the other end will receive it.
• It’s a deliverable — a measurable part of work. Email isn’t just for communication. It’s part of work. If your boss sends an email, you pretty much have to reply. There are plenty of other tools to coordinate workflow, but everybody still jumps back into email to send certain kinds of communications, like urgent requests for information, updates on particular tasks, brainstorming, you name it. You have no choice but to respond.

There are some ways email is used that aren’t perfect. For instance, a lot of people use their email inbox as a to-do list, even though it’s hard to organize and items sometimes fall through the cracks. Here, a tool built for workflow, like Asana, may end up being better.

But for day-to-day communication, email is not going away. 

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They glide beneath the waves of the web, silent, ferocious and seemingly just waiting for the opportunity to strike. They come in all shapes, sizes and levels of annoyance, and they almost always attack when you least expect it.

Error messages are a part of the digital world and, like it or not, everyone has come across them before, from the technologically-challenged housewife to the hardcore gamer. As developers we likely see them more often than most. They’re inevitable, but the way we present these errors to the user can either have a positive (well, relatively positive) effect or a decidedly negative one.

Let’s look at ways that we can approach handling error messages so that they convey meaning and provide a good user experience. Also, I feel it’s important to note that all the examples posted here have beenchosen without bias. I only chose them because they illustrated some point.

Prevention is Better Than Cure

Before going into handling error messages, it may be good to see how we can prevent the error from happening in the first place by guiding users in the right direction ahead of time.

New passwords, for instance, are classic candidates for this method. The tweet above is funny, but it speaks to an issue that in many cases could’ve been avoided completely: letting users know about bad passwords after the fact. See how much attention that tweet got? It’s a sign, industry.

A better approach would be to inform the user about what your password validation requires, or how to make a good password, before they hit submit. Better yet, inform them while they’re typing it.

The above, an idea by the very awesome Paul Lewis which you can find here, is one such example of live feedback. Here, each tick activates as soon as the password fulfills the condition, meaning the user never receives annoying error messages. If you’re using data-binding frameworks like AngularJS or EmberJS, this kind of instant feedback isn’t even difficult to implement and goes a long way to good user experience.

A Helping Hand

When the inevitable happens, though, it’s important to make sure that errors are helpful and lead users to where they likely want to go. Don Norman, of the somewhat legendary Nielsen Norman Group, advocates a collaborative approach when it comes to error messages, giving users helpful guidelines on how to get their task done.

Continue reading %The UX of Error Messages%

The breakout trend in e-commerce this year has been mobile, and we saw that in the kickoff of this year’s US holiday shopping season. Mobile drove 50% of all online shopping traffic on Black Friday and 28% of total e-commerce sales. 

But some retailers’ websites take a long time to load on smartphones and tablets, which can be frustrating to shoppers. Sites that take 10 seconds or longer to load experience 46% fewer page views, according to Radware.

When discussing the opportunity in smartphones and tablets, the e-commerce industry often forgets that retailers need both apps and mobile websites to thrive. In a recent BI Intelligence report, we benchmarked retailers against one another in terms of mobile site performance. 

• Overall, the mobile web is a more popular portal, especially for traditional retailers. Some traditional retailers skew dramatically toward mobile. Home Depot and Best Buy see nearly 100% of time spent on their mobile properties via the browser, despite also marketing their apps. 
• Etsy is an online-only retailer that sees more browser engagement, at 63% of time spend.
• Mobile site performance is all over the place: Sears, the retailer with the fastest-loading mobile site, saw about six out of every 10 minutes of mobile time spend happening on the mobile website. Sears also notably sees a greater share of mobile-only visitors than either Amazon, eBay, Walmart, or Etsy. (See chart, above.)

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 Here are more of the key findings from the report:

• 58% of mobile retail dollars going to the top 500 mobile retailers will come from the mobile web this year, with in-app purchases accounting for the rest, according to Internet Retailer.
• The mobile web is also how many consumers prefer to shop on a mobile device. 51% of shoppers were more interested in shopping on the mobile web over apps on their smartphones in 2013, according to Adobe data.
• The mobile browser, which is often a gateway to retailer sites, is an important first stop for shoppers using their smartphones in a store. 82% of smartphone shoppers say they use a mobile browser’s search function to research products when they’re in a store, according to a 2013 study conducted by Google. Another 62% say they go directly to a retailer’s mobile website, while only 21% use a retailer’s mobile app in a store. 
• Yet, despite the mobile web’s importance to shoppers, retailers under-utilize their resources for selling through this popular shopping channel. Only 60% of the top 100 global retailers have a dedicated mobile website. In fact, 32% are still showing mobile users a desktop-optimized version of their website on mobile devices. And only nine of the top 100 retailers have a responsively designed site, the format recommended by Google. 

In full, the report: 

• Looks at how shoppers use the mobile web during different stages leading up to a purchase 
• Identifies what leads consumers to use a mobile shopping app versus a mobile site, and vice versa
• Examines how retailers should leverage both the mobile web and apps
• Benchmarks the performance of top mobile retailers and their competitors
• Notes the wide variation in how retailers’ audiences are breaking down between the brower and the app

To access the Mobile Commerce Report and BI Intelligence’s ongoing coverage on the future of retail, mobile, and e-commerce — including charts, data, and analysis — sign up for a risk-free trial. 

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Nintendo has filed a patent application for a Game Boy emulator application in a move that could break from the game publisher’s previous statements promising its games would remain solely on Nintendo platforms.

The application for a Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advanced emulator was filed this summer, published by the U.S. Patent Office on Nov. 27, and surfaced by CNET.

The patent seems to imply Nintendo is looking to create the best possible experience for playing Game Boy games on newer devices, since the portable device used a low-cost processor no longer in production. While it notes games could be ported to newer platforms, “there may be an advantage in certain contexts to being able to play or execute the same binary images stored in GAME BOY.RTM. cartridges on target platforms,” which could be achieved through emulation. Read more…

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